Each of the three men regarded himself as the discoverer of the truth which would redeem the world; each devoted himself with magnificent faith and heroic courage to his task; each failed to realize his hopes; and each left behind him faithful disciples and followers, confident that the day must come at last when the suffering and disinherited of earth will be able to say, in Owen's dying words, "Relief has come." Perhaps no better estimate of the value of the visions of these great Utopists has ever been penned than that by Emerson in the following tribute to Owen:[40]-- "Robert Owen of New Lanark came hither from England in 1845 to read lectures or hold conversations wherever he could find listeners--the most amiable, sanguine, and candid of men. He had not the least doubt that he had hit on the plan of right and perfect Socialism, or that mankind would adopt it. He was then seventy years old, and being asked, 'Well, Mr. Owen, who is your disciple? how many men are there possessed of your views who will remain after you are gone to put them in practice?' 'Not one,' was the reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old age. He said that Fourier learned of him all the truth that he had. The rest of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a visionary. Owen made the best impression by his rare benevolence. His love of men made us forget his 'three errors.' His charitable construction of men and their actions was invariable. He was the better Christian in his controversies with Christians. "And truly I honor the generous ideas of the Socialists, the magnificence of their theories, and the enthusiasm with which they have been urged. They appeared inspired men of their time. Mr. Owen preached his doctrine of labor and reward with the fidelity and devotion of a saint in the slow ears of his generation. "One feels that these philosophers have skipped no fact but one, namely, life. They treat man as a plastic thing, or something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, molded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas at the will of the leader; or perhaps as a vegetable, from which, though now a very poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced--and skip the faculty of life which spawns and spurns systems and system makers; which eludes all conditions; which makes or supplants a thousand Phalanxes and New Harmonies with each pulsation.... "Yet, in a day of small, sour and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and generous proportions; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it which is superior and commanding; it certifies the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact.